"[4]: 112  After forming the Movement for Secularism with other women writers, she wrote children's stories, and co-edited the collection Sorry, Best Friend (1997) with Shama Futehally.

[4]: 111  In her novel When Dreams Travel (1999), Hariharan retells Arabian Nights with Scheherazade and her sister Dunyazad as protagonists.

"[13] According to The Atlantic Companion to Literature, it "is in fact a radical book which discusses the ruling political parties' attempt to rewrite history [...] to give the educational system a Hindu slant.

"[5] In a 2019 interview with The Indian Express, she stated, "My other books, too, looked at the power structure but I finally decided that I had the confidence and the rage to write about where I was living.

"[13] In The Hindu, Gowri Ramnarayan writes that In Times of Siege, her "angst is over the betrayal of the secularist vision which shaped the nation, the shrinkage of space in contemporary India for debate, dissent, for the co-existence of pluralities, minorities, cultures.

[15] Her 2016 collection Almost Home is described by Kirkus Reviews as "essays on identity, place, and the pervasiveness of the past in the present, by a global literary citizen" and "an uneven collection—never just travel writing or political analysis—that nonetheless seems to map new territory of its own.

"[19] Her work has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Malayalam, Urdu and Vietnamese.

[7] In 1995, with assistance from Indira Jaising and the Lawyers Collective, Hariharan challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, which placed the mother of a child as the natural guardian "after" the father, as a violation of the right to equality guaranteed under Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution.